WESTWEEK Buzz: Stars of Design Light Up the PDC (Part 2 of 3)

This year's WESTWEEK Stars of Design Award recipients were selected by a panel composed of industry leaders who are experts in the fields of home furnishings, architecture, and design. This distinguished panel of judges included Rose Tarlow, Wallace E. Cunningham, Jorge Pardo, Ron Flemming, Suzanne Rheinstein, Brandon Morrison, Karyn Millet, and Sean Knibb. Yesterday we began introducing you to the awarded Stars of Design. Here are more sparkling leaders of the industry.

Art nominee Luc Leestemaker was born in the Netherlands, in 1957, where his interests in art, theater, and communication led him to found an Amsterdam-based performing arts center and organize the European art collective Hart Poetry. For a number of years, he headed Leestemaker & Associates, an Amsterdam-based consulting firm specializing in the arts.

Upon moving to the United States in 1990, Luc, continuing a longstanding cultural tradition in his family, committed himself to painting full time, following in the footsteps of other European and Dutch artists—notably Willem de Kooning and Mondrian, for whom living and working in the United States inspired a dramatic creative transition. With Luc’s contemporary landscapes as a solid foundation, recent compositions, such as Voyagers and Map of the Wind, took the viewer into a new generation of abstract expressionism, in which landscape and abstraction increasingly merge.

Luc sees the role of the artist as the shaman, or the Greek priest, translating the message of the gods into worldly understood action and matter. The painter does this visually. The tragic mistake of the romantic idea of the artist is that he has lost half of this message. This has cast the artist in the eternal role of the outsider, whereas Luc believes that the role of the artist is to fill the world with spirituality and make it whole.

Many know Interior Design nominee Donna Livingston as the designer people go to when there's an idea, because she finds a way. The Los Angeles-based designer heads one of the country's top design firms, paving the way in the interior design field for more than 30 years with Donna Livingston Design. Her ability to transform both residential homes and commercial projects by layering rich textures, colors, and fabrics has placed her on Architectural Digest's Top 100 Designer list four times.

Donna’s true expertise lies in understanding the unique vision of each and every client, while carefully listening to his or her exact desires and working very closely with the client throughout the process. She intimately understands her clients and expresses their personalities through the design of their homes, down to the most precise details. To this end, Donna spends a substantial amount of time with each client during the design process—and even upon completion of the project—just to be certain that everything fits with the client and his or her unique lifestyle.

Visit GoDesignGo tomorrow to meet the remaining PDC Stars of Design during WESTWEEK.